Facebook has said it will start to tag potentially harmful but “newsworthy” posts amid growing criticism of how the platform handles hate speech.
Founder Mark Zuckerberg also said the site would ban adverts containing hate speech in a bid to do more to prohibit “divisive and inflammatory language that has been used to sow discord”.
The social media firm is under pressure to improve how it moderates the content on its platform, including posts by US President Donald Trump.
The issue has sparked a boycott, with consumer goods giant Unilever among the firms to pull advertising from Facebook over the platform’s failure to do more to remove hate speech.
Speaking at an online company town hall, Mr Zuckerberg announced a range of measures to tackle hate speech and voter suppression ahead of the US elections later this year.
On flagging posts that potentially violate the site’s policies but have a high news value, he said: “A handful of times a year, we leave up content that would otherwise violate our policies if the public interest value outweighs the risk of harm.
“We will soon start labelling some of the content we leave up because it is deemed newsworthy, so people can know when this is the case.
“We’ll allow people to share this content to condemn it, just like we do with other problematic content, because this is an important part of how we discuss what’s acceptable in our society – but we’ll add a prompt to tell people that the content they’re sharing may violate our policies.”
Mr Zuckerberg said there will be no exemptions for politicians or government officials if they post content which the company determines could lead to violence or deprive people of voting.
He added: “To clarify one point: there is no newsworthiness exemption to content that incites violence or suppresses voting.